A letter three years late

Three years ago this October, I signed the papers on HAUS XXIV during a stretch of days I described at the time as closer to a confession than a mission statement. I’ve written about that moment twice since. Once at the two-year mark, asking whether the bet had actually held. Once grading the real scorecard against goals we’d put in public. This year I wanted to try something different. Not a scorecard. Not a reflection on whether it worked. A letter, addressed backward, to the small and stubborn group of us who were building this with nothing but conviction and a lease.

I know things now that we didn’t know then. Some of what I’d tell that founding stretch of us would be relief. Some of it would be a warning. All of it is the kind of thing you can only say honestly from three years out, once the bet has been tested against real payroll and real client rooms, not just a belief you were willing to risk everything on.

What I’d tell you to stop worrying about

We worried, in that first year, that "collective" would read as soft to the kind of client we actually wanted. That an enterprise brand deciding who gets their business would hear "every voice has a seat" and assume nobody was actually in charge. We spent real energy rehearsing how to explain the model so it didn’t sound like an org chart with no floor.

Three years in, I can tell you that worry cost more than it should have. The out-of-state hospitality client we landed last year didn’t sign because we explained our governance model well. They signed because the work in the room was sharper than what they’d gotten from agencies built the traditional way, and the model is the reason the work was sharper, not a liability we had to talk them past. Nobody has ever walked away from a pitch because we told them a junior designer’s instinct beat mine in the room the week before. If anything, that story closes deals now instead of complicating them.

Stop rehearsing the explanation. Let the work make the argument. It has always done that better than a sentence about org structure ever could.

What I’d tell you to hold onto tighter

Here’s what I’d tell the version of us that was scared: hold the standard tighter than feels comfortable, especially once holding it starts costing you something real. In year two we left a brand strategist seat open for the better part of a year rather than fill it with someone merely good enough, and it was the right call every week it stayed open, even the weeks it felt like a failure on paper. We filled it eventually, in Houston, with someone worth the wait. If we had filled it in month two with whoever was next in the stack, the seat would have been full and the haus would have been weaker for it.

The other thing I’d tell us to hold onto: publish the number before you know if you’ll hit it. Four goals posts in, this is still the hardest discipline we practice, and still the one doing the most work. It is much easier to sound accountable than to actually be checkable. We chose checkable, in public, every December, and I’d tell the founders we were to keep choosing it even in the years the honest answer is a miss.

“HAUS XXIV isn’t mine. It’s built by everyone who walks through these doors and puts their fingerprints on the work. I started it. We are the ones building it.”

David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV

That line is three years old now. I’d tell the person who wrote it that it gets harder to mean as the room gets bigger, not easier, and that he should expect that and hold onto it anyway.

What no one could have told us about scale

This is the part I genuinely couldn’t have explained to the founders we were, because I didn’t understand it myself until we lived through it. "Every voice counts" is easy to run around a kitchen table with four or five people who already know each other’s instincts cold. It gets harder, in ways I didn’t predict, once the collective is eighteen people deep across a half dozen time zones, most of whom have never stood in the same room together.

We almost broke the principle trying to protect it too literally. For a stretch last year, "every voice counts" was drifting into "every decision needs every voice," which sounds like the same value and is actually a different one. A flat vote on every call doesn’t scale. It just slows everything down until the loudest patience wins instead of the sharpest idea. We had to build something we never needed in year one: a clear owner on every project, someone whose call it actually is, with every voice still holding the right to challenge the work before it ships. Ownership with real input beats consensus with no owner. I didn’t know we would need to learn that distinction the hard way, and I wish someone could have told the version of me who wrote the quote above to expect it.

“When it was five of us, collective leadership meant everybody weighing in on everything, and that worked fine because there wasn’t much to weigh in on yet. At eighteen, it means something sharper. Everyone still has the right to challenge the work. Not everyone has to sign off on it first.”

Marisol Vega, Creative Director, HAUS XXIV

Marisol is right, and it took us most of a year to arrive at a sentence that clean. The founders we were would have argued with it, because it sounds like it’s taking something away. It isn’t. It’s the same conviction, sized correctly for eighteen people instead of five.

What I’d leave exactly the same

Not everything needed correcting. The refusal that started this haus, the decision that a room built around one ego was never going to be the room I helped run again, hasn’t moved an inch in three years, and I wouldn’t tell that founding stretch of us to soften it even slightly. The B Corp assessment we opened this year is still open. We don’t have a verified score yet, and I’m not going to manufacture a headline out of a process that isn’t finished. That’s the same discipline the founders we were practiced from the first goals post forward, now pointed at something bigger than a hiring number.

Three years in, the thing I’d leave untouched is the thing that was hardest to believe in the beginning: that conviction, not one person’s ego, was the load-bearing wall of this whole haus. It held at five people. It’s holding at eighteen. I no longer have to believe that on faith. I’ve watched it hold.